With an effort of my own free will I stopped my body’s spinning and arrowed straight toward simmering red Sheol. Not only will I die, I thought. Not only will Set and his loathsome kindred die. His world will die. His star will die as well. I will destroy all of them.
Too late Set realized he had lost control of my body. I felt his shocked surprise, his desperate panic.
“Everything you have told me has been a lie,” I said to him mentally. “Now I tell you one eternal truth. Your world ends. Now.”
All the energies that the Creators could generate from thousands of stars through all the ages of the continuum were being trained on me. My body became the focal point of such power as to tear worlds apart, annihilate whole stars, rip open the very fabric of spacetime itself.
I sped toward the seething mass of blood red Sheol, no longer a human body but a spear of blinding white-hot energy from across the continuum aiming at the decaying heart of the dying star. Tendrils of fiery plasma snaked up toward me. Arches of glowing ionized gas appeared and streamed above the star’s surface like bridges of living, burning souls. Disembodied, I still saw the churning surface of the star, bubbling and frothing like some immense witch’s caldron. Magnetic fields strong enough to twist solid steel into taffy ribbons clutched at me. Vicious flares heaved fountains of lethal radiation as if Sheol were trying to protect itself from me.
To no avail.
I plunged into that maelstrom of tortured plasma, seeking its dense core where atomic nuclei were fusing together to create the titanic energy that powered this star. With grim pleasure I realized that Sheol was truly dying already, its nuclear fires simmering, faltering, making the entire star shudder as it wavered between stability and explosion.
“I will help you to die,” I said to the star. “I will put an end to your agony.”
Through layer after layer of thickening plasma I dove, straight to Sheol’s heart, where the subatomic particles were packed more densely than any metal could ever be. Down and down into the depths of hell where not even atoms could exist and remain whole, deeper still I beat my way past wave after wave of pure gamma energy and pulses of neutrinos, down to the hardening core of the star where heavy nuclei were creating temperatures and pressures that they themselves could no longer withstand.
There I released all the energy that had been pent up in me, like driving a knife into the heart of an ancient, dreaded enemy. Like putting to rest a soul tormented by endless cancerous suffering.
Sheol exploded. And I died.
CHAPTER 31
It was at that final moment of utter devastation, with the star exploding from the energy that I had directed into its heart, that I realized how much more the Creators knew than I did.
I died. In that maelstrom of unimaginable violence I was torn apart, the very atoms of what was once my body ripped asunder, their nuclei blasted into strange ephemeral particles that flared for the tiniest fraction of a second and then reverted ghostlike into pure energy.
Yet my consciousness remained. I felt all the pains of hell as Sheol exploded not merely once, but again and again.
Time collapsed around me. I hung in a spacetime stasis, bodiless yet aware, while the planets spun around the Sun with such dizzying speed they became blurs, streaks, near circles of colored lights, brilliant pinwheels whirling madly as they reflected the golden glory of the central sun.
I watched millions of years unfold before my godlike vision. Without a corporeal body, without eyes, the core of my being, the essential pattern of intelligence that is me inspected minutely the results of Sheol’s devastation.
With some surprise I realized that I had not completely destroyed the star. It was too small to explode into a supernova, the kind of titanic star-wrecking cataclysm that leaves nothing afterward except a tiny pulsar, a fifty-mile-wide sphere of neutrons. No, Sheol’s explosion had been the milder kind of disaster that Earthly astronomers would one day call a nova.
